I have decided to write this article on the back of comments made on Twitter by pro-independence activists supporting the closing of Catholic schools and the wider discussion sparked by Common Space editor Angela Haggerty’s response to those comments.
The subject however is crying out for serious academic study.
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Alex Salmond and Pope Benedict XVI in Edinburgh, 2010
There used to be a time in the not too distant past when being a Catholic and an SNP voter was quite unusual.
To my grandparent’s and great-grandparent’s generations Scottish nationalism was seen as a threat to Catholics. It was voted for by a small band of Protestants, led by a smaller band of Protestants and spoke of a Scottish national identity forged during the heat of the reformation.
Scotland was a country without a national parliament where the Church of Scotland’s annual General Assembly was as close to one as you could get. A country where putting your Catholic school on your CV was not a wise move, a country where the question in a job interview ‘so what school did you go to?’ had dark intentions.
Labour was the party of and for Scottish Catholics throughout the 20th century. It talked of emancipation for the industrial working class, where most Catholics were to be found.
The marring of Catholicism and Socialism in Scotland falls largely to work of John Wheatley. Born in Ireland and raised in Lanarkshire, the miner went on to found the Catholic Socialist Society in 1906. He would go on to become an MP. Not an ordinary thing for a Catholic immigrant miner.
When Labour came to power in 1924 Wheatley was given a cabinet position and expanded council housing at an enormous rate which made him a tremendously popular figure amongst the industrial working class.
What then did nationalism have to offer to the people of Port Glasgow, Coatbridge and the Calton? Labour built them houses to live in, hospitals to care for them and industry to labour in.
There used to be a perceived threat that once Scotland was independent the Protestant majority would close the Catholic schools, lock them out the good jobs at shipyards again and slide Catholics back down the economic ladder. Indeed the nickname of the SNP to many Catholic Scots was ‘SNP – Scottish No Popery”.
To our contemporary view this seems a ridiculous hypothesis. Decades ago however this was the view of a great many Scottish Catholics.
The visit of Pope John Paul II to Scotland in 1982 was perhaps the most significant moment for Catholics in this country since emancipation. Hundreds of thousands welcomed the pontiff to Bellahouston Park and Murrayfield.
While Catholics held open air mass in the Glaswegian summer sunshine former SNP leader Billy Wolfe joined the Rev.Ian Paisley in opposition to the visit in a letter to the Church of Scotland’s magazine Life & Work. Wolfe also remarked in 1982 on the invasion of the Falklands that it would be a failure of democracy to allow a “cruel and ruthless fascist dictatorship of a Roman Catholic state” (Argentina) to take over the “mainly Protestant and democratically minded Falklanders, mostly descendants of Scots”.
On both occasions the SNP leadership distanced themselves from their former leader’s comments. The damage was done however. Catholic perceptions of the SNP weren’t changed they were cemented.
It was not until 2011 that more Catholics in Scotland voted SNP than Labour, 43% of them according to the 2011 Scottish Election Study. At the referendum it is believed that Catholics were the single most pro-independence religious group in Scotland – 56% voted yes while only 40.9% of Church of Scotland members voted yes according to a 2015 study by Edinburgh University academics.
This revolution in voting behaviour wasn’t an accident. It was forged through the hard work of Salmond’s leadership of the SNP and his staff. We find the roots of it stemming from the ashes of the 1994 Monklands by-election.
In the Monklands (one of the few Scottish district councils whose population was a Catholic majority) it was alleged that the Labour run administration was purposely giving less funds to non-Catholic schools. Indeed all 17 of the Labour councillor group were Catholics, adding fuel to the sectarian fire. In addition to the allegations it was claimed that Coatbridge was receiving far more capital spending than its neighbouring town with a Protestant majority, Airdrie.
The by-election was set during this sectarian scandal which the press christened, Monklandsgate.
The campaign was a brutal affair amidst these sectarian tensions. Labour won but with a much reduced majority against a 19% swing to the SNP. The new MP, Helen Liddel, accused the SNP in her victory speech of ‘playing the Orange card’. Her comments coming hours after she was spat on and called a ‘Fenian bastard’ by a voter.
Within weeks of the by-election Salmond met Thomas Winning, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Glasgow who would by the end of the year be a cardinal. He knew he had to act to repair the wounds.
Salmond found in Winning a political ally, to his surprise he was pro-independence. From this point onwards Salmond began to detoxify the SNP to Scotland’s Labour voting Catholics.
Later that year in his conference speech in Inverness the SNP leader lavished praised on Catholicism, ‘The Catholic view or social justice informs our attitude to inequality in Scotland’. Moreover he asserted his opposition to the ‘institutionalised religious discrimination’ of the UK’s Act of Settlement which bars Catholics from becoming head of state and that in an independent Scotland a bill of rights would enshrine Catholics as first class citizens in contrast to the UK.
Looking back on the disastrous by-election in 2009 Salmond noted its importance: “For me, this was a profoundly depressing experience, but one that in retrospect has turned out to be most helpful. It made the SNP look very closely at the whole issue of discrimination”.
The SNP did not win the hearts and minds of a majority of Catholics in 2014 and in May of this year by luck but by the visionary leadership of Alex Salmond decades ago.
The constituency boundaries have changed and what was once Monklands is now Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill. Not only did Coatbridge vote yes it delivered an SNP MP in May’s 2015 general election with 56.6% of the vote on a 36.3% swing.
Yet today it seems the far-left pro-independence seem eager to close the gates of Catholic schools all in the name of dogma. They want the state to decide the ethos of schools, they want parents powerless and the religious life in Scotland weakened further. Those wrapped in the banner of ‘progressive politics’ won’t be satisfied until every church pew is empty. This is only one weapon in their arsenal which aims to elevate the state above all else.
In doing so they line up with the bigots that only seek to rip up the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act to satisfy their own longing for a Scotland which does no longer exist. These outspoken education activists care not about any other education policy other than closing Catholic schools. One can look upon these single policy activists in a similar fashion to the ‘animal rights activists’ who only care about banning Halal meat.
No serious political party will go into an election with a thirst to close popular schools all for the sake of dogma. I hope those in the SNP who have worked so hard over decades to reverse the perceptions of independence will speak loud and clear to the ‘progressive’ fringes of their movement.
In the SNP there’s a phrase comes up often to remind young activists and new members, ‘we stand on the shoulders of giants’. Some in the party ought to remind their members and other pro-independence groups of this.
